Microsoft Office is the most complete office suite of all available and to be found. The problem is that, as you may have imagined, it has a fairly high cost per license compared to other alternatives to Office. If we are students we can activate Office for free in a simple way without having to buy the original license. In the event that we are not, we will have to resort to free alternatives to Microsoft Office , and today we have made a compilation of the seven best to install on Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows 7.
Microsoft Office… but Online
Did you know that there is a version of Microsoft Office Online? Although it does not have all the programs in the Microsoft suite , we can use Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint , in addition to OneNote and OneDrive, completely free of charge and without any limits. All we will need is a Hotmail or Outlook account to access Office 365.
Once we have accessed, we can use Office as if it were the Windows version, having practically the same functions as this one.
LibreOffice
The free and free alternative to Office. Being open source, it can be downloaded as many times as you want at no cost. Best of all, it is compatible with both Windows and Mac and, of course, Linux, and its low weight makes it ideal for less powerful or older computers .
As for the programs in the LibreOffice suite , we can find up to five different ones: Writer for text documents, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for diagrams, Base for databases and Math for mathematical formulas. Its functions, like Office 365, have nothing to envy those of the original Microsoft Office .
FreeOffice
An alternative to Office 2019 very similar to the latter. Its interface, in fact, follows the same design lines as the Microsoft suite , making it ideal for those who are used to using it intensively. It is also fully compatible with Office files without having to convert them previously and, therefore, lose the format.
Regarding the programs included in the Free Office suite, it has three main tools: TextMaker as a substitute for Word, PlanMaker as a substitute for Excel and Presentations as a substitute for PowerPoint. The number of functions they integrate is practically the same as Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice
The parent program of all free alternatives to Microsoft Office. Both FreeOffice and LibreOffice draw directly from OpenOffice code. The problem with the latter is that, given its abandonment by the developer community, it does not have the same support as the latter two .
So much so that OpenOffice has the same number of programs as LibreOffice : Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw and Math. The difference with respect to this is that it does not have the same amount of functions, and its interface is somewhat more crude in terms of options and appearance. In all other aspects, both alternatives are equally valid.
Calligra Suite
An open source suite that not only claims to be one of the most comprehensive Office alternatives, but also Adobe software like Photoshop and Lightroom .
It has no less than ten different tools , and their functions have nothing to envy those of Adobe and Microsoft programs. Words for text documents, Sheets for spreadsheets, Stage for presentations, Kexi for integrated databases, Plan for project management using Gantt charts, Braindump for notes and diagrams, Flow for flow charts, Karbon for vector drawing, Krita for professional layered image editing and Author for e-book creation.
Of course, it is compatible with Linux, in addition to Mac and Windows. For the latter two, the current version is a public beta in testing , so it is to be expected that its performance is not as expected.
Apple iWork
Although we do not have an Apple Mac computer, the company offers, like Microsoft, its iWork suite online. The downside is that performance is quite poor even on computers with sufficient power to be based on HTML.
The suite in question has three different programs: Pages for text documents, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for slide presentations. It also has iCloud Drive to handle all the documents that we generate from the iCloud account.
To access it we will need an iCloud account that we can create by clicking on this link.
Google Suite
The North American giant's suite is also proclaimed as one of the best free Office alternatives for Windows, Mac and Linux .
As it is an online solution, it is compatible with practically any computer, and its performance is the most reliable of the three online solutions (Apple's iWork and Microsoft's Office).
There are four different tools available: Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Google Keep (for notes). By having applications for Android and iOS, we can edit all the documents from the mobile and the computer simultaneously .
WPS Office
One of the best alternatives to Office 2018 and 2019. Its interface, like FreeOffice, mimics the design lines of Microsoft Office, which is why we will not miss anything if we come from the Microsoft suite. In fact, it is 100% compatible with Office documents without the need for prior conversion.
Writer for documents, Spreadsheets for spreadsheets and Presentations for slide shows are the three tools that WPS has. Compatible with Windows, Linux and Android, it has a paid version whose functions are expanded and are even more similar to those of Microsoft Office.